Daemon (mythology)

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The words daemon and daimon, sometimes dæmon, are
distinctively Hellenizing or Latinate spellings of δαιμων, used purposefully
today to distinguish the daemons of Greek mythology, good or
malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior
divinities and ghosts of dead heroes", from the Judeo-Christian usage
demon, "a
malignant spirit that can possess humans". The Greek translation of the Septuagint,
made for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, and the usage of daimon
in the New Testament's original Greek text, caused the Greek word to be applied
to a Judeo-Christian spirit by the early 2nd century CE. Then in late
antiquity, pagan conceptions and exorcisms, part of the cultural
atmosphere, became Christian beliefs and exorcism rituals. The transposition has
recently been documented in detail, in North Africa, by Maureen
Tilley (see Links).

For Greeks and Romans, daemons ("replete with knowledge", "divine power",
"fate" or "god") were not necessarily evil. Socrates claimed to
have a daimonion, a small daemon, that warned him against mistakes but
never told him what to do or coerced him into following it. He claimed that his
daimon exhibited greater accuracy than any of the forms of divination practised at the
time. The Hellenistic Greeks divided
daemons into good and evil categories: eudaemons (also called
calodaemons) and cacodaemons, respectively.
Eudaemons resembled the Abrahamic idea of the guardian angel; they watched over mortals
to help keep them out of trouble. (Thus eudaemonia, originally
the state of having a eudaemon, came to mean "well-being" or "happiness".) A
comparable Roman genius accompanied a
person or protected and haunted a place (genius loci).

In Plato's Symposium, the priestess
Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a god, but rather a good daemon.

Daemons were important in Neo-Platonic philosophy. In the Christian reception
of Platonism, the eudaemons were identified with the angels.

Cyprian was
debunking the gods of the pagans as a euhemerist falsehood in his
essay ""On the Vanity of Idols", but he had this to say of daemons:

"They are impure and wandering spirits, who, after having been steeped in
earthly vices, have departed from their celestial vigour by the contagion of
earth, and do not cease, when ruined themselves, to seek the ruin of others;
and when degraded themselves, to infuse into others the error of their own
degradation. These demons the poets also acknowledge, and Socrates declared
that he was instructed and ruled at the will of a demon; and thence the Magi
have a power either for mischief or for mockery, of whom, however, the chief
Hostanes both says that the form of the true God cannot be seen, and declares
that true angels stand round about His throne.

"These spirits, therefore, are lurking under the statues and consecrated
images: these inspire the breasts of their prophets with their afflatus,
animate the fibres of the entrails, direct the flights of birds, rule the
lots, give efficiency to oracles, are always mixing up falsehood with truth,
for they are both deceived and they deceive;10 they disturb their life, they
disquiet their slumbers; their spirits creeping also into their bodies,
secretly terrify their minds, distort their limbs, break their health, excite
diseases to force them to worship of themselves, so that when glutted with the
steam of the altars and the piles of cattle, they may unloose what they had
bound, and so appear to have effected a cure. The only remedy from them is
when their own mischief ceases."

The daemons are real enough— "the principle is the same, which misleads and
deceives, and with tricks which darken the truth, leads away a credulous and
foolish rabble"— it is relying upon them that is deceptive. In this way the
daemons passed easily into Christian "demons."

The specific motivation for the orgy of inspired destruction of Greek and
Roman sculpture unleashed at the end of the 4th century, as soon as Christianity
was in secure control, is revealed here: the images were inhabited by demons. As
in all such destruction, the faces were especially attacked: "defaced."

The North African Apuleius summed up their
character in the Golden Ass (2nd century CE): "The daemones have an
animal nature, a rational mind, a soul subject to passions, an aetherial body
and they are immortal." The Hellenic and Roman gods were increasingly seen as
immovable, untouched by human sorrows and suffering, existing in a perfect
heavenly sphere (compare Epicurus, Lucretius). The
daemones were earthbound, passion-tormented, and in Late Antiquity,
loremasters were separating them into the noble kinds and troublemaking kinds.
The gnostic followers of Valentinus multiplied the
circles of daemons and gave them oversight in various areas of concern to
people: oracles, animals, and, interestingly, as "patron daemons" of nations or
occupations (compare Patron saint).

In the process of Christianizing Roman populations in the official
Christianity from the late 4th century, theologians, hermits and monks, and the
bishops and presbyters who influenced individuals, had their own repertoire of
ideas, which were derived from Scripture and from the ambient culture of Late
Antiquity. Within the Christian tradition, ideas of "demons" derived as much
from the literature that came to be regarded as apocryphal and even heretical as
it did from the literature accepted as canonical.

The lore of Hermes Trismegistus
is a source both for pagan and Christian conceptions of daemons, for in the
Corpus Hermeticum, they functioned as the gatekeepers of the spheres
through which souls passed on their way to the highest heaven, the Empyrean. As
the Early Medieval St. Gall sacramentary
testifies to the continuity of this belief of daemones in the oldest
extant prayer for anointing the dying:

"I anoint you with sanctified oil that in the manner of a warrior prepared
through anointing for battle you will be able to prevail over the aery
hordes."